Pascal's Fire

Scientific Faith and Religious Understanding

Keith Ward

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780744582
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion & Science

Groundbreaking, ingenious and devastatingly clear, Keith Ward's Pascal's Fire is guaranteed to reignite the timeless dispute of whether scientific advancement threatens religious belief. Turning the conventional debate on its head, Ward suggests that the existence of God is actually the best starting-point for a number of the most famous scientific positions. From quantum physics to evolution, the suggestion of an 'ultimate mind' adds a new dimension to scientific thought, enhancing rather than detracting from its greatest achievements. Also responding to potential criticisms that his ultimate mind is unrecognisable as the God of Abraham, Ward examines our most fundamental beliefs in a new light. Emerging with a conception of God that is consistent with both science and the world's major faiths, this ambitious project will fascinate believers and sceptics alike.

PART I

THE FORMATION OF THE SCIENTIFIC WORLDVIEW

1

THE END OF THE ANTHROPOCENTRIC UNIVERSE

In many traditional religious views, human beings are the most important things in the universe, and the whole of nature is created to serve humans. After Galileo, that view was turned completely on its head. Nature is created to express the glory of God. The role of humans is to conserve and shape nature and possibly to share in the creative power of God and the richness of God’s awareness of the cosmos. Humans are one among possibly many forms, and not the final form, of intelligent life. But humans need not be seen as accidental or peripheral to the universe – they can be seen as an integral, if small, part of the divine plan.

AIM: To show that the conflict between Galileo and the Roman Catholic Church was not primarily a conflict between ‘religion’ and ‘science’. To show that parts of the Bible should not be taken literally, especially when they deal with events for which the writers had little or no evidence. To show that it magnifies God’s glory to know that humans are small parts of a much greater universe, which God values for its own sake.

1. GALILEO AND ARISTOTLE

The rise of the natural sciences has changed for ever the way we look at the universe. In fact it has changed our view of the universe not once, but at least four times. Each time there was a conflict with more traditional theories that had been held until then, but on each occasion the new view was victorious.

Some historians talk as though the conflicts were between science and religion, and this has generated the myth that science and religion are bound to conflict and that science always wins while religion always retreats. This is a distorted view of what actually happened. The conflict on each occasion was between traditional science and new science, and there were religious believers on both sides of the conflict every time.

In the first part of this book I shall look at four major changes of outlook that the sciences brought about. The first three can be associated quite easily with specific big names of science, and it would not be hard for anyone to guess who they are going to be. Galileo, Newton and Darwin would be on anyone’s list of the greatest scientists of all time. The fourth is more difficult. You might expect the big name to be Einstein, and in a way it was. Yet the fourth change was brought about by quantum theory, and Einstein was actually opposed to many of the ways in which quantum theory is now usually interpreted. So, surprisingly, he represents the end of the old physics more than the birth of the new (quantum) physics.

The first big change, though, has to be associated with the name of Galileo. The legend has grown up that this was the first and decisive battle between science and religion. Galileo certainly won the battle, so some popular histories of science depict the story as the beginning of the death of God and the triumph of materialism.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Galileo was, and always remained, a devout Catholic. There are many readily available scholarly accounts of the dispute between Galileo and the Church, which show the error of depicting it as a battle between progressive science and reactionary religion. James Reston, Jr’s Galileo: A Life (HarperCollins, New York, 1994) is just one work that puts the dispute in its proper context, and Richard Blackwell, in Galileo, Bellarmine and the Bible (University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1991), focuses on the religious dimensions of the debate.

There was certainly a conflict between Galileo and the Roman Catholic Church, which came to a head in 1633 when Galileo was condemned by the Holy Inquisition and forced to retract (or say that he retracted) his Copernican views.

The Polish Catholic lay canon and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus had asserted that the earth circled the sun in On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, published in 1543, the year of Copernicus’s death, but there had been little public reaction. Copernicus’s book was dedicated to Pope Paul III and carried the endorsement of the author’s local cardinal. However, in 1616 the consultants to the Congregation of the Holy Office (the Inquisition) declared that the heliocentric hypothesis was formally heretical. And when Galileo later re-affirmed the Copernican hypothesis in a very combative way, an affronted scientific establishment took action. Galileo was convicted in 1633 of disobeying an injunction allegedly placed on him in 1616 not to promulgate Copernican ideas. He was placed under house arrest, mostly in his villa near Florence, until his death nine years later.

The conflict, however, was not so much between Christian faith and the Copernican view that the earth circles the sun, as between established Aristotelian science and the ‘new science’ of close observation and experiment that was threatening the old scientific elite.

The Catholic Church had associated itself firmly with the authority of Aristotle, who was taken to be master of all sciences (except theology, where he needed to be corrected by Thomas Aquinas, the ‘angelic doctor’). Aristotle’s concepts of substance and accident, form and matter, act and potency had been used in framing doctrines like that of transubstantiation and ideas of God. His system of the four types of causality, material, formal, efficient and final, was accepted as the proper framework for natural science. Partly because of this, his physics was accepted as definitive, and the Biblical account of the universe was largely interpreted in terms of it.

Ironically, the medieval use of Aristotle was itself a major revision of the Bible, since the Hebrew, Biblical, idea of the cosmos was not very like Aristotle’s. Nevertheless, Aristotle, after some initial suspicion (the Archbishop of Paris prohibited the teaching of Aristotle in the thirteenth century), had become identified with the dogmatic definitions of the Catholic Church, and with the scientific establishment, which was sponsored by the Catholic Church. Galileo’s insistence on close observation with instruments like the newly invented telescope, and on repeated experiment, seemed to threaten accepted scientific orthodoxy, and it was strongly resisted by the guardians of that orthodoxy, which was entrenched in the institutions of the Church.

2. FAITH AND FACT

No one doubts today that Galileo was correct. In 1992 the Catholic Church formally rehabilitated him, thereby admitting that the Inquisition had been in error. Matters of scientific fact are not matters of faith, and if an authoritative interpretation of Scripture includes matters of scientific fact it may be, and it demonstrably has been, in error.

This is a point of great importance for religion. Many, probably most, alleged religious revelations include or presuppose statements about matters of scientific fact, about the nature of the cosmos and the place of humanity within it. If all such statements are fallible and some of them are mistaken, it becomes very important to decide exactly which matters are the province of the natural sciences and which the province of revealed faith. At one time it was possible to say that everything in a holy text was guaranteed true, but after Galileo we must first ask what is the subject matter of the text. Only matters of faith, not of science, can be said to be immune from error. But how are we to distinguish the two? Or, if we cannot do so, what are we to make of a faith that is prone to error? Can we any longer trust it?

One move that we might make is to deny that the Bible, which was the text in question in the Galileo case, contains any statements of scientific fact, and to say that the mistake the Inquisition made was to think that it did. The Church had long been used to interpreting Biblical statements about God metaphorically. God does not literally trample on the nations (Habakkuk 3:12). So it is not too big a move to take apparently factual statements about the physical universe metaphorically. Saying that it was created in six days, for instance, had usually been taken metaphorically. ‘Days’ were normally thought to be not periods of twenty-four hours, but possibly vast periods of time. So it is not too hard to take the whole account metaphorically, and say that the point of the Genesis stories is not to tell how the universe originated, but to put in story form some important spiritual truths about the relation of humans to God and their responsibilities to creation.

Cardinal Bellarmine, writing in 1616 to Galileo’s friend Foscarini, saw this possibility, though it was not considered by the authorities that Galileo had yet proved his case. Bellarmine writes:

I say that if a real proof be found that the sun is fixed and does not revolve round the earth, but the earth round the sun, then it will be necessary, very carefully, to proceed to the explanation of the passages of Scripture which appear to be contrary, and we should rather say that we have misunderstood these than pronounce that to be false which is demonstrated.

The Catholic Church has now made this move, and officially and unequivocally accepts a scientific account of the origin of the universe. But does this have implications for faith in God? It does entail a denial of Biblical literalism, and it does show the importance of metaphor and story in the Bible (and in any other religious text). That is important for particular religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam, but it does not affect belief in God as such.

There is no doubt, however, that a Galilean view of the universe differs from that of most traditional religious views. Before the sixteenth century in the West there was a generally held Christian belief that the created universe had only existed for a few thousand years, that it all existed for the sake of human beings and that it could not be expected to exist for very much longer.

In India there was a very different view that the universe had existed for innumerable aeons, and that it was only one of an infinite number of universes, so that humans were a very small part of finite reality. Yet the universe was thought to be morally ordered by the laws of reincarnation and of karma, according to which all acts receive their due deserts sooner or later. Many of the things that happen are due to the actions of gods or spirits, whose presence is often apparent in the physical universe. The present age is a degradation from an earlier golden age, when the gods walked the earth and when humans were more intelligent and less self-centred.

The discoveries that the sciences have made about the universe put these, and all other pre-scientific cosmologies, in question. There is a huge contrast between Aristotle’s view of the stars as set on a crystalline sphere above the spheres of the sun and moon, and what everyone now should know, that our sun is just one star among billions in the galaxy of the Milky Way, which is itself just one among billions of galaxies in this cosmos, which may also be just one among billions of universes, possibly generated within black holes.

The information about the universe the sciences have uncovered is enough to change radically all pre-scientific theories of what the universe is like. To put it bluntly, all pre-scientific views of the physical universe were incorrect in at least some important respects. To the extent that ancient religious and philosophical beliefs incorporate references to the nature of the physical universe, they stand in need of revision. How far must such revision extend, and how important will such revision be for religious traditions originating long before the age of science?

This is the problem the Galilean dispute bequeathed to the Christian Church, and by implication to all religions.

3. HUMANS REMOVED FROM THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE

Apart from this problem, Galileo’s astronomical theories do not seem to pose a threat to religious belief as such. But they do suggest the need for a fairly drastic revision of the traditional Christian worldview.

The traditional view was that God had created the earth as the centre of the universe, and placed human beings uniquely at the apex of the created order, so that everything in creation ultimately existed ‘for the sake of man’, as Thomas Aquinas put it – ‘The whole of material nature exists for man’ (cited in Paul Santmire, The Travail of Nature, Fortress, Philadelphia, 1985, p. 91).

When in 1608 Galileo heard that a Dutch lens grinder, Hans Lippershey, had made a refracting telescope, he immediately set out to construct a telescope himself. Using this, the first astronomical telescope, Galileo was able to show that the Milky Way consisted of distant stars, that Jupiter had moons and that Venus had phases, which was best explained by supposing that it circled a central sun.

From these beginnings, our ability to probe space has increased enormously. The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, enables us to receive infrared wavelengths from the oldest objects in the universe, which existed billions of years ago. Galileo’s observations, though they could hardly have envisaged the vast universe we can now see, laid the foundation for our realisation that humans are not likely to be the centre of God’s purposes, since the universe is much vaster than was ever imagined and the earth is not the centre of it.

It does not follow that, just because we are not physically at the centre of the universe, we are not central to God’s plans. This planet may still possibly be the only inhabited world in the whole universe. At the time of writing, no communication from any other inhabited planet has been received. As the physicist Enrico Fermi asked, ‘Why aren’t the aliens here?’ Since some stars are billions of years older than the sun, we might have expected there to be some intelligent life in the universe long before we existed. Why has it not communicated with us? If there is no intelligent life anywhere else in the universe, it might be said that conscious intelligent agents are of more value than billions of light years of unconscious and unintelligent space. Humans could still be the culminating point of the universe, even if the earth is not physically at the centre of it.

In that case, Galileo’s relocation of the planet earth would have no religious implications at all. It would not matter where we were located physically, as long as we were the central focus of God’s love. But a great many astronomers, following up Galileo’s relocation of the planet earth in the universe with more recent discoveries about the vastness of space, see things differently. They make much of the fact that humans have only existed for a tiny fraction of the history of the cosmos, which is thought to have originated with the big bang between thirteen and twenty thousand million years ago. I am trying to be careful about this number, even though the current favourite is fourteen billion years (that is an American ‘billion’, which is much smaller than a British ‘billion’). I am very conscious that when you quote a number like this, some physicist will say, with a pitying smile, ‘Ah, that was last week’s theory.’ Still, it seems to be agreed that it all started a very long time ago.

In addition to this, the conditions of human existence are so very precarious and possibly accidental (dependent on, for instance, the extinction of the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago, and on the planet not being hit by a major comet or asteroid since) that it does not seem that they could be planned at all. Moreover, humans are doomed to become extinct, since the sun will die in five billion years and the earth will become uninhabitable. Even if we survive that by travelling far into space, the whole universe, in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics, will inevitably become uninhabitable eventually. At least, it will be uninhabitable by any form of life remotely like ours. (See the discussion in chapter 17.)

Predictions of the ultimate end of the universe change with great rapidity, and there is a danger that by the time you read this sentence quite a new theory will have been devised. Yet it seems agreed by cosmologists that conditions in the far future universe will be quite different from how they are now. The present view (in June 2006) is that the universe will continue expanding, and perhaps accelerating (see Martin Rees, Our Cosmic Habitat, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2001, chapter 8). Eventually, all stars and planets will die, groups of galaxies will merge and we will be left with ‘a single amorphous system of aging stars and dark matter’ (p. 118). As Paul Davies puts it, ‘In a standard picture the very far future of the universe would be characterised by a dilute and ever-diminishing soup of extremely low-energy photons, neutrinos, and gravitons moving virtually freely through a slowly expanding space. Normal matter, if it exists at all, might consist of the occasional electron and positron drifting slowly through this invisible soup’ (Paul Davies, ‘Eternity’, in The Far-Future Universe, ed. George Ellis, Templeton Foundation Press, Radnor, PA, 2002, p. 47). The prospect does not seem too enticing, and it does not seem that anything like human beings could exist at that point. Humans are inevitably destined for death, and that may seem to reduce all human achievement and purpose to a pointless blip in the story of a pointless universe. In the light of these facts, it can seem implausible to think the whole universe exists just for the sake of such short-lived, accidental and doomed organisms as we are.

Galilean thought, or more correctly this cosmic perspective that is the heir of Galilean thought, can suggest the dethronement of humanity from any important place in the cosmos, and the lack of any objective purpose in human existence. It certainly undermines the traditional worldview of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

4. THE BEAUTY OF THE COSMOS

But on closer reflection it seems more reasonable to say that the post-Galilean picture of the universe calls for a revision, indeed an enlargement, of the traditional religious worldview, rather than for its complete renunciation. For anyone who believes in a creator God can affirm that the cosmos is created so that God can enjoy its beauty. After all, theists believe that the cosmos is a product of the divine mind, so its creation can be compared to the work of a supreme artist, enjoyable and worthwhile for its own sake, without any reference to possible finite persons at all. It would not matter if there were never any human beings at all. The universe could still have a point, and that point would be its expression of the power and wisdom of the creator, and God’s enjoyment both of the process of creating and of the created universe itself. That is part of the traditional view – the Hebrew Bible depicts the divine Wisdom as ‘rejoicing in his [God’s] inhabited...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I: THE FORMATION OF THE SCIENTIFIC WORLDVIEW
• PART II: THE SEARCH FOR ULTIMATE EXPLANATION — THE GOD OF THE SCIENTISTS
• PART III: THE GOD OF RELIGION
• Bibliography
• Index